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Professor Jenne' Rodey Andrews, M.F.A., is a highly regarded American poet, critic and memoirist. Recent work has appeared in former Autumn House Publisher Michael Simms' Vox Populi (over fifteen poems) The Passionate Transitory, Belletrist Coterie, The Adirondack Review and elsewhere.

Andrews' current ms of poetry Beautiful Dust was a finalist for the 2014 Autumn House and she recently withdrew the work from Salmon Ltd, Ireland to protest unmoderated bashing of American writers by Irish writers on the press's social media pages.

Her most recent collection, Blackbirds Dance in the Empire of Love, lauded by Robert Bly and endorsed by poets Jim Moore, Dawn Potter and Patricia Kirkpatrick, appeared from Finishing Line Press 2013. A booklength collection Beautiful Dust was 2014 finalist for the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and solicited by Salmon Press, Ireland. Turning on work set in the West and her native Southwest the collection is under submission to 2019 publication prizes.

Andrews is currently hard at work on two new memoirs: The Shame Garden: A Woman Writes of Isolation, Despair and Self-Redemption, which in intensely wrought and imagistic prose poetry chronicles the anatomy of shame; it is the poet's late-in-life tour d'force, sending the reader through Dante's circles of hell, the sewers of Paris ala Les Mis, mano a mano confrontations with the Alien mater familias, fusing literary and vintage cinematic works in an elliptical dance with human history and experience of being Other. The poet has no idea of what will become of this work but hopes it finds a home as memoir with a small press.

A four part interview with Andrews went live at poet Maureen Doallas's blog Writing without Paper in 2010.

Other collections include the full-length Reunion, Lynx House Press, The Dark Animal of Liberty, Leaping Mountain Press, and In Pursuit of the Family, edited and published by Robert Bly and the Minnesota Writers Publishing House.

Her work has been anthologized in Heartland II, Northern Illinois University Press, 25 Minnesota Vols. I and II, Wingbone: An Anthology of Colorado Poetry, Women Poets of the Twin Cities, Oil and Water and Other Things that Don't Mix, and elsewhere.

Essays have appeared in MPR's Magazine, The Colorado Review, The Twin Falls Times News, and miscellaneous journals.

IIt is Prof. Andrews' belief that one's collection of poetry must be judged on the quality of its craft, voice, and language, not its themes.


With Mr. Bly the memoirist Patricia Hampl wrote a forward to her first collection and is considered the "mother" of the modern American memoir although she arguably shares this title with Mary Karr for Karr's The Liar's Club. Andrews mentored Karr in Minneapolis when the former was circa 19.

Professor Andrews has had an illustrious teaching career at Colorado State University and the University of Colorado where she taught prelaw students in the making of argument and the issues-oriented seminar The American West. She was the highest rated instructor in the University Writing program during her tenure at Boulder.

Currently Professor Andrews writes daily at age 70, having been rendered housebound in 2007 in a fall from a horse, at home with her lover and companion of thirty years the fiction writer Jack Brooks, ten new poems a month, and is working on an additional memoir about her pioneer roots, "Territory Fever: The Story of an Albuquerque Family," posted as chapters are finished to Loquaciously Yours where the poet has produced over 450 essays in the past decade on a variety of topics as well as book reviews. Upcoming: a review of Ethna McKiernan's new Salmon Collection.

Ms. Andrews is also a Civil Rights Advocate advocating in 2019 for the civil rights of the poet Ping Wang who recently won the AWP Award for Memoir.

In 2015, after a long battle, Andrews extracted her MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Colorado State University, begun and finished in the 80's, self-advocating under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In fact Andrews was instrumental in the Colorado Commission on Higher Education's approval of the MFA at CSU.

She is a literary fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Minnesota Arts Board Fellowship, was short-listed for a Bush Foundation Fellowship, and was full-time Poet in Residence for the St. Paul Schools from '74-78.

She lived in St. Paul from 1971-78 during the first wave of the Twin Cities literary renaissance, one of the first poets to inaugurate The Loft Literary Center, co-founding Women Poets of the Twin Cities which as noted boosted the careers of Mary Karr, Ethna McKiernan and others, and spent the summer of 1973 in Reggio Calabria, Italy which gave rise to the "voluptuous prose-poetry" memoir Nightfall in Verona posted in entirety here, designated by arts maven and former friend Caroline Marshall of NPR The Writer Reads as "fabulous."

Circa 2010 Andrews also founded a poetry group on She Writes which included Dawn Potter, Katha Pollock and other noteworthy writers, and supported the work of Meg Waite Clayton, fiction writer in addition to mentoring a number of other up and coming writers.

There is no way to estimate the influence on the lives and work of the some 12,000 students k-12 she met and encouraged in the seventies, but the poet James Tolan has attributed his career to her work as it was anthologized in Heartland II, Lucien Stryk, Editor. Professor Stryk read the title poem of In Pursuit of the Family on NPR.

As noted the poet lives in northern Colorado's Poudre River Valley with her husband, fiction writer Jack Brooks; the couple's daily life is centered around writing and enjoying their beautiful imported Golden Retrievers;-- see the Ardorgold website for details. Contact: jenneandrews2010@gmail.com.

Signed copies of the Blackbirds Dance collection, endorsed by James Moore, Patricia Kirkpatrick and Dawn Potter, are available from the poet. She posts new work below and is available for mentorship and virtual readings via Skype.

She is happy to critique ms. of poetry, fiction and memoir for a small fee.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

New Prose Poem: Psalm of the Shadow for DVerse OLN and Beyond...

Revised...
Tropea di Isola   Calabria


After Listening to a Requiem in February

In rooms overrun with
chimerical skeins of dust
the heart and soul lift off
on spangled currents
of morning.

What great loneliness it requires then,
what an expanse, polar,
with its blue tinge of death

To release even one note of such music
as a great mass’s  Rex Coelestis
dark birds calling and  ascendant, one body,
from the splintered tree.

Ii

Rising February wind,
Union Pacific sounding a call longer
than night

Daylight and memory are the afflictions.

The ablative absolute of language—
Spreading their wings, they were aloft--
salves the soul.

But how unredeemed we are!
The warring in the desert
where the Great Spring is asunder:
the soldier’s foot on the corpse
of a girl.
 
Iii

Perhaps long ago
we should have migrated
to another stone warmed
by a different star;

For it is the matriarch arctic penguin
leaving the egg on the feet
of her mate

Who swims off, to feed,
cascade of mothers taking
to the frigid water
in a clamor of agreement:

‘E vivere:  it is to live:  and to gorge:
‘E mangiare!

And then in a mandela of feathers
the fathers, eggs tucked under their bellies
turn their bodies to the storm,
one and then the next on the outer rim
cycling back into the pulsing thicket
Of the flock:

Look what they have to teach us!

iii

Even so, the matriarch elephant
leads her family over the savannah
in the drought;
she weeps over the fallen calf
her tears rivulets in the cross-hatched
leather

Of the one who discerns
the precise location of the spent marsh,
the thorny stubble that bruises the mouth.

And behold the snow leopard,
the hours it takes her
to drag her kill up the sheer cliffs of Everest
back to the lair where her survivor cub
languishes in hunger:
they ravish the meat, their blood rewarming
in an instant.

Iv

What has become of our will,
when we were a people, working one
for the other--

What do I leave at your feet?
What of your hunger aggrieves me?

We are the leaves of the oak tree
with its roots embedded in fathoms
of dark mud:
indelibly mortal, quick to bud, open,
drink in the sun and dying back,
surrender.

We do not want to leave the ornate rooms
of the grand estate where
the imagination roams, corseted
into privilege
or Salzburg Cathedral
where a jubilant choir sings a requiem.

But who can bear the beauty
that pierces the skin, abrades the heart--
our own heavenly clamor when the goodness

In us climbs to its apogee, and we
come together singing in petition,
like all the garrisons of the star-cast night.


copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012


7 comments:

Timoteo said...

3rd paragraph--My ex used to say, "Just shoot me," when contemplating a future prospect like that...and I would have to concur. Hold onto as much freedom and independence as you can forever...because a system that warehouses human beings past their "usefulness" strikes me as being akin to that little guy with the mustache and his gang.

Brian Miller said...

we all flee and return...and its echo are rather haunting...the stripping away of the road there at the end...and the shearing off of the angel wings...deng viceral and certainly gets the attention...tight prose jenne...

Anonymous said...

Hi Jenne! They are both wonderful poems. (I actually think I find the prose poem more striking--I think because it is a bit more troubled, and the images of the folded wings, and the down against the water are just such unique pictures and juxtapositions.)

They are both beautiful--the close of the first one an especially poignant part--the way you bring in all the different species, and the pierced skin, abraded heart.

Very fine. K.

Semaphore said...

In Japanese, the symbol for 'poem' is the same as for 'song'... and whenever I read through your poetry there is such a musicality that it underlines that Japanese precept. And yet, that musicality belies the the agony I know that you go through to choose le mot juste, that subtle craftsmanship that one must take so much pain to hide in the final presentation. As always, a beautiful piece.

Mystic_Mom said...

Jenne - as usual you draw me in with words and images, and leave me with the taste and feel of so much more. Wow...I'm in awe.

Scarlet said...

I am here tonight to just let your words touch my lips and inspire my pen ~

You write beautifully and I am always in awed with the images you draw here ~

joanna said...

"What do I leave at your feet?
What of your hunger aggrieves me?"

you stir up deep thoughts with this one, Jenne. delicate & powerful all at the same time.